Cover of Strathmore Vision mixed media with digital handdrawn letters saying "new sketchbook"
Drawing,  Life Musings,  Pixel Art,  Sketchbooks

Zen or stressed out, still making art

Well, it’s been long enough since I painted digitally that Windows is once again bugging out and not correctly interpreting my Wacom tablet’s pressure. Hooray >_< I forget how I fixed it last time… a text file added somewhere in user config settings? Gah ~_~ adding it to the To Do List of Doom.

Been stressing this week – trying to find energy after work has been kind of monumentally impossible. But hey, I’m all caught up on The Magicians. Which means *wipes a tear away*, I have to wait until Thursday to watch S4E7 (because Amazon Prime adds it later than it airs and we don’t have cable). I don’t know if I want to hunt down another show to balance it out (i.e. find something else to distract my stressed out brain), or just be patient until April, because then Game of Thrones will be my obsession. I’m still checking Watchers on the Wall like…every other day hoping for a trailer. I am going to miss the crazy speculation and fan theories and taking a single crumb of content (like the six seconds or whatever from the latest HBO trailer) and trying to guess what it will mean for the upcoming season.

Finding out that HBO is producing His Dark Materials as a miniseries made me squeal with joy. I was a teeny, itsy bit COMPLETELY obsessed with that book series in high school. I really need to give it a reread. I own the 2007 Golden Compass movie, but I won’t deny it felt disappointing – just didn’t have the heart of the main plot of the books. No air date yet, of course :/

I made a little progress on learning pixel art techniques last week – more isometric cubes, using it to spell out a word, practicing dithering, and some animated stars.

Pixel art of several stacked isometric cubes, animated with the light source changing.
Isometric cubes spelling out the word muse, with a larger cube in the corner
Pixel art square showing dithering effect
Small animation of stars

The first three were in Photoshop, the stars in Piskel (I really like how their simple animation interface feels). The stars are mostly inspired by one of the intro scenes in Earthbound, when you’re walking to the meteorite site at night (say that three times fast, lol). I finally started a new game of it last weekend. :3

This week, I did splurge on a new sketchbook (which I know I didn’t really need…). I wanted to dedicate it specifically to trying out new mediums and practicing drawing faces. Used pexels.com creative commons zero photos to study (my go-to source). Pencil, sharpie, ballpoint pen, felt marker – all going well so far. Though the one of the Elvis-looking guy, ugh, that one didn’t really turn out. But I’m trying to learn to flow between loose mark making and tight controlled marks; in that regard I think these studies were a success ^_^.

I took the photos with my new camera – finally got an SD card, yay! And a tripod for taking video. My lighting set up leaves something to be desired though. I tried taking a photo of my drafting table, but alas it was too dark. I think I’ll try again tomorrow, with the window curtains open. I scored a nice saddle seat style wooden stool at Menards – it was the last one (on display) so I got a discount *happy dance*.

Today, Ricky took me to a surprise lunch (he wouldn’t say where we were going til we got there), and it was a place that had super yummy veggie burgers and sweet potato fries. So good *_*

Still need to read more of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell… maybe I’ll go do that now, even though *cough* laundry, dishes, dusting *cough* there are probably other things I should be doing from the List of Doom. Whatever!

*Skips off to the magical land of reading*

Listening to: The General, Dispatch
Current mood: creative

I'm an illustrator and web developer honing my skills and learning all I can about drawing, painting, and storytelling through visual art.